Adventures in music: Creating & Playing a totally new (and better) musical instrument: the jammer.

Music

Jun 13, 2012

My jammer has a pair of symmetrical keyboards – in other words if you play Do-Rae-Mi with the middle, ring and little fingers of the right hand, you canalso play the same notes with the same fingers of the left hand. This means that notes go up away from your body, which totally bewilders some keyboardists – it verges on musical heresy!

However, this symmetry offers a big-time, huge advantage: you only have to work out one fingering for the new keyboard. Just to be sure I briefly tried out the other option – both keyboards going up to the right, but this was horrible - it more than doubled the work, and worse; the left hand just doesn’t work with the jammer scale going the wrong way: the fingerings were killer. Enough said: with the jammer’s Wicki-Hayden key layout the keyboards have to be symmetrical.

Now, while having to work out - and learn - only one fingering is good, the question remains: if one hand learns a pattern, does the other get an inkling of what to play as well? On all instruments I know of this question is moot (unless you practice years enough that the remapping is automatic), so we are into completely new musical (and possibly scientific) territory here.

A bit of background first; I have found that it’s best to have a minimum of 2 sets of music I am learning:

1. A relatively challenging new piece or two.

2. A short set list of songs I know relatively well – 80% or better, but that I can challenge myself to improve on (Rock Band 3 is great at encouragement). This practicing of a whole stream of notes – with immediate feedback of errors - seems to be just superb for skill growth and deep-lock-down.

So I have played several songs many, many times. One, Centerfold by the J Geils Band. I can play up to 90+% notes-correct with my eyes mostly closed (there are some sneaky turns that make it hard to get higher).

How much has seeped through to my left hand? It was simple enough to get the answer: 63% of the notes of the whole song - not just the chorus.

63% is surprising, especially considering that my neglected left hand isn’t as speedy or precise as its brother. 25% I would have though good, 50% excellent, 63% means that the left hand picked up 2/3 of a musical skill effortlessly.

Jan 17, 2012

... some hints on what to expect when learning an alternate instrument

Finally, I am seeing significant progress in playing my jammer. The critical point came after about 9 months of practicing 3 hours per week. Finally we have some data on what to expect in learning to play an alternate keyboards.

First, Some background analysis

Consistency = faster learning

The fundamental reason to use an consistent- layout (the formal, ugly name is "isomorphic") keyboard is to reduce the number of fingerings one has to learn, thus saving much time. This is the reasoning behind the century-old Janko keyboard.

2 Dimensions - faster learning + speed

Further, through use of two dimensions (fancy new concept, that!) and careful choice of the particular brand of layout consistency, one gets further advantages: far simpler finger movements; and simpler, smaller hand movements (i.e. on the sonome and jammer respectively). These advantages compound, as shown in the rough (and quite conservative) picture of the advantage is shown right.

But what is the real advantage?

Now this sounds very cool, and one could analyse finger movements and other ergonomics to estimate the learning speed, giving naive and erroneous results:Wow 1/12 the keys! times Log(1/4) the movement! that comes to 24 times faster! !

Whoa! There are other keyboarding skills that one must also learn: rhythm and developing a musical ear. The actual improvement rate will be somewhat less! Still, learning to play in many different fingerings is a significant challenge: the beginner's keyboard books I have devote over 2/3 of their pages to addressing this challenge. The best way, the only sure way, to discover the real learning rate improvement is experimentally.

What do we expect to see change?

How will this "increased learning rate" actually manifest? Unfortunately we humans only learn at a set rate: nerves only grow so fast; they will learn to press finger x down on key y at time z at the same rate on a piano or a guitar or a jammer.

So learning the first set of notes, chords and songs will take just as long. It is when you have to learn the next song that things will improve, and this should steadily increase over time.

Once you've over come the little hurdles that being the first explorers in a new territory entail . . .

Initial confounding factors

Always the introduction any new gadget has confounding factors the slow down initial introduction. I have found three confounding factors that initially got in the way of learning my jammer.

1. It's a New Device

The first is simply that alternate keyboards are brand new: no body of common practice exists; the musician is on his or her own. Thus fingerings have to be worked out and limitations discovered, good beginners' practice pieces need to be found.

Worse, current keyboard books and exercises for the beginner are optimized in various subtle ways for the piano, for example the Hanon excercises are designed specifically for the key of C. This sabotages them for our use.

I have may much progress in this area, and can save my fellow jammerists much work in this area. Let me know and I'll post what works.

2. The Horse-drawn notation

The second is the #$%#@$% ancient notation! Standard Traditional Notation (TN) is highly optimized for the traditional keyboard, and this presents a sustained obstacle: it takes mental time to translate an erratic note spacing to the even note spacing of an alternate keyboard, and the vertical progression of notes in TN to the folded layout of the jammer or sonome. Even with the Janko layout there is a lot of trouble.

The notation challenge was greater than I had hoped. However, I am discovering "this pattern translates to this chord inversion" rules that do greatly help.

3. Nerves only grow so fast.

You still have to learn to press the right keys at the right time on any keyboard. The growth of the nerves and building of the movement skills still takes the same time.

And the Actual Results are . . .

I expected and can now confirm, a new keyboardist can expect this initial learning experience: This is worse than I had hoped , better than I had feared. I am sure that two of the confounding factors can be greatly reduced:

Fixing the New device issues

I've worked out a fingering for the jammer, and found that it works very well, much better than the fingering used on a traditional keyboard. It is simple, ergonomic, puts all the needed notes under the fingers and is quick to learn.

Fixing the Notation issues

As for the fact that we must live in a musical world that is flooded with TN, it is possible to work out rules of thumb for reading TN and simple training drills that speed developing this skill.

The actual experience

Twelve years ago I learned to sing, this required a lot of work (1+ hours/day) for 18 months.

Since I only have about 3 hours a week for jammer practice, I was prepared for a long spell of not much progress (naturally I hoped for much, much less, an month or four). Alas, it took 9 months.

Early experience

Just as indicated in the diagram to the left, there was a fair "learning to learn" period (All the details of this and the quirky XBox setup will be posted in a separate posting). Learning to play along with a song was at first a laborious process of translating a moving piano-layout image into a jammer's "folded scale" pattern. I learned to play 6 songs at "Normal" level, put them into a set list to use as a standard drill, and tried to gently improve them while I investigated learning other songs. I rigorously used the fingerings that I guessed will work best, even when the song of the moment could be played a bit more easily in a sloppier style.

Growing a new ear

At first not much happened, except ... my musical ear improved; I became and remain way more conscious of the keyboard part of songs, and I heard details on notes and timing I'd never heard of before. I got ghostly flashes of what keys were being pressed. My typing improved quite noticeably (to about double the speed -50 wpm), while my handwriting got worse. I knew what was going on - I was growing nerve connections and the nerves themselves slowly - at the rate of fractions of a millimeter a day. I has also snitched the handwriting wiring in my brain and repurposed it for jammer playing.

One thought I had was "this is a really roundabout way to learn to type". Meanwhile things got a bit easier.

Then finally it came together

Then about two months ago, I took up Billy Joel's Miami 2017, in D major, at the "Hard" level, and found that I could play large parts of the Intro section - which has quite a sequence of eighth-notes at half speed right off the batch correctly. It thereafter took me a full month to bring my speed up to 100% of Mr. Joel's without a single error, but the important part was the instant way that "my fingers" had learned the general pattern from doing a few specific songs and had developed speed. Had learning generalization begun, of was it just a fluke?

The fingering works

Another important fact was that I could play the whole thing - 1 1/2 octaves without moving my hand more than a centimeter or two. The keyboard fingering was validated, and in fact works very well; there is not a note combination or sequence that is hard to play in the songs I've covered.

Now (mid-January 2012)

Last week I moved on to Paul McCartney's Maybe I'm Amazed, which has twice the chords of the songs in my set list set, at the normal level. I played many sections of it at full speed, right off the bat, and now after a week of practice, I can play nearly the whole song at full speed. I can also play it with my left hand at 70 % speed! While musically this is not thrilling: "Normal" level in Rock band 3 is 2-note chords, this is great validation in several ways:

The jammer fingering really works well: The fingerings were easy, my hand do not have to move more than 2 1/2 centimeters over a wide range of chords.

A simple, consistent ergonomic fingering really does facilitate skill generalization. So went the theory, so goes the actual practice!

Skill transfer between hands really does happen at a very significant rate. This will be a big, no a huge, time saver.

Analysis

It's about time I saw some results! Who would have thought that the initial part of learning to play an instrument would be such a slog? Fancy that: learning is hard work, even if you sugar coat it and add all sorts of nifty gadgets and get-educated-quick schemes.

Caveats: I'm 59, thus my nerves may grow a trifle slower than an spritely young 30-year old. This just means I have to be a bit more dedicated and sneakier.

The Future

In the long term, we hope for results as charted above. Lets see what really happens!

Ken.

Extra Notes.

I've done this before, that is, I've already learned one, far more complex instrument, about 13 years ago. The instrument was my voice. That's right, I'm one of the few adult people that have learned to sing from no singing ability whatsoever (I kept recordings and can prove it), with "no singing ability" being defined as (1) unable to match pitch (or octave) with another singer or instrument and (2) no ability to properly vocalize: I sounded lousy.

Learning to sing was a lot of work: it took 18 months of roughly an hour or two a day (an hour of lessons/week, 3 hours in a community choir, and an hour a day of practicing while commuting in a car) before singing simple songs became as effortless as walking.

The moral: Learning a new skill as an adult takes time but eventually you can get there.

Apr 20, 2011

Now that all components of my jammer are in built and in place, I’m focusing on learning to actually play the thing, as quickly and painlessly as possible.

However, “the possible” is rapidly changing due to innovations in several areas. This is an exploration of what gaming technology has recent brought in, which seems at first bizarre - what could games possibly have to do with music?

Guitar Hero, when it burst onto the scene a few years back, intrigued. The game itself was only a game, and taught the player only to press a few buttons in time to music, guided by visual effects that force-fed the buttons and timings. Yet, it had definite possibilities: it was well designed, gave fast, accurate feed-back on mistakes, immediate reward for success and was not a slog like formal practice is, but way fun; my son played it for hours, and organized parties around the game.

Side note: I sometimes ponder; if my thirty-something son had spent just half of the time and intense focus he spent playing video games (say 8,000 hours out of an estimated 16,000) on practicing an instrument he would now be a certified virtuoso and I could retire.

Quick, accurate feedback coupled with a measured reward system are the key ingredients for fast, child-style learning, which is exactly what one wants in learning to play music – dry rote study can only be done for so long before the mind and the fingers revolt. Besides, my goal is to be able to join a good band, sometime before I grow old and senile, and so time is of the essence. Rote learning is just not very effective - very few pro musicians learned that way! - and it is s-l-o-w.

Hardware

Just in the last few months has it become possible to hook up midi instruments to a high-quality video game. The ingredients (beside the game console itself) are:

A decent game: said game is Rock Band 3, and it has a “PRO” instruments option; the option to select having a real instrument (midi) hooked up to it

An Xbox/Playstation/Wii to Midi input interface: Rock Band 3 midi PRO-Adapter. One plugs a standard Midi cable (non-USB) into it.

An instrument with standard midi-out, of course.

So what about alternate instruments? Can they work as well? The answer is an unqualified yes. The additional ingredients are:

A decent alternate keyboard or other instrument: even a PC keyboard will do, although it has definite limitations. The raw, unmodified Axis-49 will work, but the signal has to do through a computer.

Midi-routing software to convert the instrument’s production (which comes in on the “Midi-In” logical buss) to a signal on the “Midi-Out” buss. My new Midi Integrator does this well and there are doubtless others. Midi Integrator is free, works on Win/Mac machines, works as soon as installed and is easily configured.

I was able to select songs I knew well, a couple of Billy Joel pieces.

At first it was pretty hard to relate hitting a key that was way off to the left or right as being really under or over the current row. My fingers would get confused, and would say "the diagram says it's over there, why do you want me to go down here or up there".

By the second session, I was getting used to it, and by the fourth session it seemed fairly natural. Still I have a long way to go. Interestingly, playing pieces ranked "harder pieces" on the jammer actually seemed to improve the learning rate, as it was pretty simple to memorize the movements. With the aid of a dot on C to help with touch-positioning, I did not need to look at the keyboard.

Sharps and flats give me trouble still are giving me trouble, but since they are always in the same relative place, I even managed to hit a few.

Playing practice scales in "Practice mode" was not useful at all -the fingers got totally mixed up and did not improve! This is totally counter-intuitive, and an interesting discovery, possibly even a scientific-investigation worthy one. *I am not sure why this would be. Good thesis material, perhaps?

* "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny'" - Isaac Asimov

Update #1

Just had my fifth session (about an hour an a half) - learning progresses, at a rate noticeably greater than I have gotten from standard practice. I have gone from one star to 3- stars at the "easy" level.

Future Thoughts

With midi integration, this could train a musician to be very versatile on a jammer or sonome:

want to sound like Jimi Hendrix? Hmmm, just add the pitch and mod effects and pedal control and switch to Guitar mode

Want to play drums – just figure out a finger mapping that makes sense, you’ll have all the basic drum sounds under the fingers of one hand, and turn on drum training.

Apr 06, 2011

Introducing a radical new midi-utility concept: table-driven midi integration software for faster, flexible instrument building. All inputs on a PC can become midi inputs, as needed, with easy reconfiguration.

· Works especially well with 2-dimensional instruments like the Axis-49 and -64.

· Enables features that are normally considered “high-end”, such as keyboard splitting (parts of a keyboard playing other instrumental sounds), key-modulation or octave-shifting at the touch of an assigned key.

· Extensible with a Max/MSP development system. For example, it can be made fully micro-tonal.

I discovered the need for a midi integration system when building my then-experimental jammer keyboard. I found that programming key-reassignment was an absolute pain, and so I made the configuration table-driven. This proved to be very significantly faster and much more convenient.

Next, I envisioned a host of features needed to push a midi system well beyond the ordinary: mulitple-sustain controls, mouse-controlled pitch bend, key-modulation, and more. I guessed that with a little bit of extra work I could create a system useful to many, and so I put sustained effort into creating a package that could be easily customized according to your needs. I also created a variety of annotated configuration tables to help get started.

Well, the "little bit of work" turned out to be a "fair bit of work", so I hope many musicians and developers find my system useful. If you think Midi Integrator has merit, please post about it!

Feb 23, 2011

I have little extra time in my life, so when it comes to blogging, practicing or developing, I have to choose one or the other, and choose the one that will give the most benefit to the most people. For the last 4 months I've focused on developing Keyboard Integrator (a better title might be Midi Integrator, but I'm stuck now with the name). The reasons for this hard work? The tool will fill a big gap in midi software, and make possible much faster development of alternative musical instruments. At the other end, will be useful just to make any computer more of a digital audio workstation.

So what the heck is it?

A simple, open-source (free) system to convert PC inputs; keyboard, mouse, joystick etc, to midi input, combine it with other midi instrument input, then route it to whatever real or virtual instrument you wish.

The goal is to have a “set-up once and forget” process.

Highlights:

Allows one to add one or more a pitch-bend and modulation touch-pads to any midi keyboard, and works especially well with new 2-dimensional instruments like the Axis-49.

Can convert your PC-keyboard into an auxiliary midi-input controller, with any key triggering either a note, a control command, pitch bend, or preset action.

This grew out of a project to build jammer keyboards, into what I hope will be a great resource for anyone that needs their computer to help them more with music production.

Ken.

for more info, see: http://sites.google.com/site/altkeyboards/instruments/integrator

Dec 11, 2010

I and my friends are attempting to write out information about music, especially how to learn it, make it, and how the thing actually works, all in a more-or-less scientific (yet whimsical) way.

Warning, this is my personal blog, and is apt to contain babbling, for more organized information on alternative, innovative instruments, See: Alternative Keyboards, which is much more organized and readible.

In a nutshell, we are combining current music theory, modern knowledge and simple ergonomics to produce "piano 2.0"; an improved musical keyboard,mostly built on the $430AXiS-49keyboard from C-Thru plus a few other things.

I've built four jammers and have found they have very significant advantages over the traditional design .. and few disadvantages too, of course.

In balance, they are faster to learn, very significantly faster and easier to play and more expressive. They are also easier to play by ear, in other words, to jam, hence the name.

In practical terms, it takes 10 years to become skilled enough to be passable pianist. With the jammer design, the same level should be reachable in 3 yrs. It's not a free lunch, but it is less expensive, yet ultimately a better value.

Indeed, the meshing of the keyboard layout with music theory, kinesiology and human perception is a great leap forward: it's fun to have an instrument where the melody and the chords intertwine, where it's blink'n easy to add chords to a melody and music just plain makes sense.

Like children, it takes a community to grow an innovation, so please join in; post your ideas and comments. This is your opportunity to make a difference, to get in at the start of something very cool, and have fun doing it.